Morning all.

Just want to say that I absolutely love it when adults can be adults. Yes, everyone is allowed to get upset, but if you decide to let that control you, everything falls apart. So if you put that aside, focus on being productive, and put aside your pettiness, things go a lot smoother.

This is coming from a personal experience I recently was involved with, so nothing to do with anyone here. Just feeling good about it haha

Also that and the other thing

Okay, we ARE the dnd.se.

We always have been. It's not just that D&D is the most visible RPG, it's that D&D is the most confusing RPG with the most interconnecting material.

So it's the RPG that raises the most questions.

This isn't a D&D 5e thing either. When 4e was the edition du jour, we were all about D&D 4e and 3.PF.

this question though - rpg.stackexchange.com/q/124280/43856

Asker came back to clarify the edition - 5th. But he still didn't mention the game.

Much like how you might say gaming is the Minecraft.se, as much as they wish they weren't

From the fact that the text he has posted is an exact match to the 5e Monk, I'm guessing yes, it's D&D, and I'm willing to burn my rep for posting the answer before that clarification. Sorry, Meta.

Voting to re-open but not upvoting your answer because it has a quote block interrupting a sentence and that's very confusing.

@Ben is that thing? Dang

@HellSaint the practice of not answering an unclear question isn't about knowing what the person is talking about from matching text.

It's about following the guidelines so that other people don't do the same to lesser effect.

I could agree with you on that - yeah. It's a direct excerpt from the PHB, so there's no denying it.

@BESW fixed that.

But when Little Johnny sees that some questions are answered without knowing what game this is about, he gets the idea that he can fill in the blanks.

@trogdor Yeah. You'd be surprised how many people go to them for Mojang support.

@Ben And also about not teaching the original asker that they can get answers without putting in the minimal work expected.

It's a very usual practice for long array of equations in math articles, though, so I'm used to having a block interruption in the middle of a sentence, kinda

@BESW Also this ^

@Ben wow that is sad

I don't go on other SEs but if I did that would probably have been one of them

On top of that, they have an unofficial rule that any mod support questions are off-topic, because there is just too much work involved in finding out what the issue is.

@BESW As I mentioned, the asker actually came back and answered with the edition. He's clearly willing. But he's like "oh, there are other (than D&D) RPGs?"

Until I saw for myself what a hive of scum and villany it was

@HellSaint Absolutely. It's just a matter of order of operations.

now the question is cleared but for some reason we take thrice the time for reopen than for closing.

@trogdor Unfortunately being a gamer, you have to accept that everyone has a degree of saltiness

@HellSaint That's fine. It's happening, and the entire thing is probably gonna have taken less than half an hour.

The Stack should never prioritize speed over careful consideration.

@Ben wait what does that have to do with posting on the gaming Stack?

Um,... But that was a joke though

Well... it's not untrue

Also I think it's terrifying that "That's just the way gaming is" is a thing now.

About what games are supposedly popular to post about no less

Not about salinity level

Case in point: I am receiving a stream of rep as we speak, over my Dark Souls answers... 10 rep every few minutes. Which I am skeptical of because while it might be legit, this person is finding my answers useful, I do not feel like it's going to stick.

@BESW I don't accept that but wtv

Gaming is about playing games

Nothing toxic or frustrating should be considered the normal

The biggest problem is that people on gaming.se usually have the problem of "Fix it". They don't really care about the site or anything else, they just want the problem solved. Forums are the best place for that kind of attitude, but it is often a lot slower because there's the possibility of discussion and "me too" posts, which don't solve anything.

So they see the Stack, with it's 1:1 ratio (exaggeration), and see a more immediate solution.

But when it comes to understanding what they need to provide, they get frustrate, because they don't want to do the work to solve the problem - they want some one else to do it for them.

SO has a similar problem too.

That sort of reads into the situation though doesn't it?

Perhaps a little more diluted, but it's still there

@trogdor Not in my personal experience.

I am pretty sure some of the people posting are new to any Stack for example

Yes. You can see the difference. There are 2 different types of newcomers - the ones that are willing to learn, and understand, and the ones that are not.

When that is the case not immediately knowing the rules is understandable

Mk

But when the rules are explained, that's when it becomes apparent whether or not they actually care.

Fair enough

And, sadly, people do get salty about it, more than you'd think

That does sound sad indeed

I definitely would have loved to hear that the gameing stack was even half as good as this one

It is. I do enjoy it. But the difference is that the community is perhaps a lot more... strict?

You know PurpleMonkey?

I would not say "know"

I have seen purple monkey

He's probably a good example of how posts are dealt with over on gaming. Here I really feel the community is a lot more friendly, welcoming.

We talk to each other, help understand, and explain, etc. There is a real "community" vibe here.

@Ben friendly and welcoming is part of my factoring of "good"

XD

Wait, how is PurpleMonkey a good example of how posts are dealt? I'm confused

Over on gaming, there is, unfortunately perhaps a lot less of that - but I think that's just because the "community" is a lot larger.

@Ash yeah.

@HellSaint He gets to the point.

@Ash I know. It's not really coming out the way I'd like it to.

I love gaming.se. You can see by my rep - it's the most frequented stack I go on

Your firehouse analogy is probably the best way to go.

@Ash I can definitely see how that would hurt

@Ash Definitely not

I want to appoligize for any contribution I made to that

Especially considering I don't go there, I am just reacting to a description of it

So, sorry about that

Which I am doing a terrible job of lol

I do apologise.

@Ash don't appoligize for seeing something you thought was rough and unfair XD

Lol

Haha

Ok, you have trogdorian dispensation to appoligize for whatever you want then

@Ash Can you at least see what I'm trying to say though? Like, I'm not saying in anyway that gaming is a BAD place.

It's just there is a lot to deal with. Like you said, it's kinda like a firehouse.

We're all just people, and yeah, we do try to make it a good place, and I do see that, being a part of the stack for as long as I have.

Like Frank (a gaming.se user) - I really like him. He does comes across as a bit blunt a lot of the time, but that's not because he doesn't like the people posting on the site. It's because he just wants to make sure that people understand how the site works.

The people who contribute to the stack make a lot of effort, and it is visible, to make it a good place. We do help a lot of people, by communicating, contributing, understanding.

What I was getting at with what makes it come off as "less" (in any way) is purely the traffic.

More traffic simply means more potential for less savoury traffic. New users that are unwilling to contribute.

Hopefully I clarified that a bit better.

Ok

@Ash So once again I do apologise if I implied that gaming was a "Bad" place.

So what you mean is that it might have a larger number of people checking that Stack out, and that that means more people who potentially show up, make a mess, and then get frustrated when someone tells them "we have rules here" ?

I mostly just can't look at it. The pinstripe background pulses like a low-power florescent light.

@trogdor Yes

@BESW lol

@BESW I never noticed that

I'm sensitive to low refresh rates.

@Ash no sweat @Ben ok cool

Somehow the pinstripes match the frequency of my screen's refresh rate so that they flicker almost imperceptibly.

@BESW Oh dear :/

At least, I assume that's what it is.

At any rate, looking at Arqade makes my eyeballs feel like they're being slowly sucked dry.

That sounds absolutely horrific

have you ever been in a room lit only by a low-power florescent light, the kind that seems okay but then you notice that it flickers slowly enough to notice if you pay close attention?

@BESW Not that specifically, but yeah.

I get that with my tinnitus sometimes lol.

@BESW yes, most certainly

(All florescent lights flicker; they work by passing rapid on-off charges through a gas that glows when that happens. But most of them flicker fast enough that our brains can't notice)

And my hearing is bad enough without the escalated ringing in my ears

See also, looking at a monitor with a refresh rate under about 80.

I can't actually see what arcade looks like right now because the mobile version is the standardized one

That's actually pinstripes:

Hmm

It might just be the screen I am on right now, but that doesn't really hit me all that much

What if you put it on a larger resolution?

@Ben you mean how did?

...magnification?

...zoom?

Oh

I used the browser's Zoom In function.

@Ben And it's less of a problem, but still a problem, when the stripes are larger.

Like, zoom in so that it's on 150%, so that the distance between the lines are bigger (like you have done)

Do you mean what if I did?

Oh NVM wtv

Does that make it better? @BESW

XD

Ah. Did not see that lol

I suspect it's connected to whatever mechanism runs my migraines, because the experience is similar to the visual aberrations that are the first signal of a migraine.

Well that's just downright nasty :/

I'm itching to start my new games this weekend!

I've got my D&D game, and then another on Saturday, but I don't know anything about it yet.

@BESW also, I feel this process is technically longer. A question is closed, because it doesn't meet the requirements of what a question should contain. Then to re-open, we need to consider why this question was closed, to begin with, and evaluate whether or not that has been resolved.

Oh, very much so.

But in this case the whole thing was resolved, from post to re-open, in under half an hour.

Yeah

@Ben I'm glad you linked that question. When OP was talking about dragonborns and tails, I was like... wait... that's not a tiefling...

But I would never think that someone (you, it seems) actually asked that one in RPG.se haha

Well, there are always odd questions (odd being things you would not normally think of). Like what to do with the Space Marine corpse in my Freezer, or exactly what can get a Dark elf drunk haha

@Ben lightly braise the space marine corps, and then throw it out the airlock?

To be eaten by your local space horrors presumably

Not too picky about which ones either because apparently there are like, plenty of kinds to choose from

And viola you contributed to your local ecosystem

@Ben ah that old gag, a former member of our game group used to pull that one all the time

lol

He is where I got all my Warhammer knowledge that didn't come straight from internet osmosis

To be fair both categories together still leave me far from an expert

@trogdor I have a friend like that too. He runs (ran) all our old Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader Games. They were awesome

We never ran anything in that setting

But he made jokes about that kind of thing regardless

If you like dark and brutal, give it a shot

It uses a percentile duce system

dice*

I eventually read a couple books in a series about an Inquisitor,... I don't remember his name, and I honestly assume there are a ton of books that fit that description

As you could guess there was plenty of Heresy in it

@Ben it's probably not in my sphere to be honest

@trogdor Ravenor?

@Ben maybe?

That name does seem familiar

He's got a few books. Incredibly powerful psyker

I believe he may have happened to be one of those too

Due to an unfortunate incident, is basically now a husk in a chair

Lol

Go figure

It was definitely a weird experience reading those books

(For reference, that's a chair with a seat made of woven corn husks.)

jeff strikes again

I thought I killed jeff, how dare he still show his face,... Oh wait he doesn't have one he is a meme,... Carry on then

Memes never die

Yes they do

The just don't die fast

And you can always bring them back

Well actually sometimes they do die fast

But not always

The can totes die though

Unless humanity is extinguished or knocked into the Stone age

Then this meme definitely dies

Unless humanity decides to continue it in paper form.

It's scary to think that is a possibility.

The digital meme would still be dead

I'm uncomfortable with all the assumption that's going on here... rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/124284/tails-vs-stumps

What assumption exactly?

"sounds like", "I would assume"

Ah

To be fair,.... In order not to assume in this case,... You would need to talk to the DM in question and actually get an answer from her

Which I stated in my comment

(or alternatively get an update from the OP saying what it turned out to be)

As it is, I feel like my comment would (should?) be better off as an swer

I see no comment from you on the post?

Oh, what?

I was removed...

Why?

Yeah is see 2 from hellsaint and one from myxy

Dunno

It was a link to a question I posted saying that Dragonborn don't get tails.

If you posted what could have been an answer there is a rule

Meaning this is outside the bounds of the standard rules

No answers in comments might have prompted a deletion

Beyond that I dunno

Well, this is clearly leaning toward a reference to Critical Role, which use a lot of house rules to make the game play easier to understand by removing a lot of distinction on things. Houserules/homebrew.

So, saying that RAW, Dragonborn don't even get tails to begin with, seems like it should be more of a comment, as it opens the question to requiring clarification

As an answer, it doesn't seem very productive.

All I mean is that your comment could have been removed because of the no answers in comments rule

Well, that's what I'm saying. It's not an answer.

@Ben I only say that because of this here

(I don't know how to quote on my phone)

After thinking about it, "The question states 'a', I have a source that says 'b', so.... huh?" doesn't seem like a great answer after all

If it even just looked like an answer it could have been deleted

Comments have a high turnover rate when they rub up against the rules that interact with them

Hm. Fair enough

I'm not by any means saying you meant it as an answer either, just that it's possible someone thought it was an answer in the comments

Yeah. I can understand that

Unfortunately intent isn't scannable

@trogdor Isn't that the plot line to Minority Report?

lol

Lol

You got me, now move along citizen, wouldn't want to get precogged would you?

Haha

I found the plot of that movie nonsensical for sure

Tom Cruise gets precoged for murder,.... That he only ends up commiting because he is precogged for murder,......

What a ridiculous paradox

You would think the totalitarian state would have ironed that major flaw out by the time they eliminated murder

I was pretty disappointed in the ending to that movie, the fact that a prophecy not only was self fullfiling but caused itself to happen as well as the events it predicted made me a bit peeved

@trogdor tenor.com/view/lazy-writing-deadpool-gif-11030401

I tried. Best I could do. Lol

Fair enough really

At the time it came out, I was much less able to accept that kind of thing

(A thread.)

@BESW This might just be my bubble, but I feel gaming is getting more friendly and less toxic. Or maybe people are just talking less about the toxicity. In any case, I'm hopeful for a better future

while my experience is pretty low on toxicity, a lot of bad things still happen to other people

that isn't to say I am unhopeful for the future though

it seems that at least to some degree, awareness of this kind of thing is increasing, and while that isn't enough by itself, it's the starting point to change

Yeah well, I visited a con once

ONCE

And I was basically lied to about its nature to get me to come. :D

lol

I never went to any

ever

I am a social person, and probably appear super extroverted to all my friends and everything, but crowded indoor spaces really tick me off. Outdoors have much more leeway.

but my stance on this, as a man, is that I don't have the experience to make the call that the larger portion of toxicity targeted at women in the hobby/industry is nonexistent

@trogdor That's a good point. I was mostly thinking about less gendered issues

I have no authority to say that,.. and in fact hear stories every once in a while of horrible $#$#$#

Like death threats to game devs for RUINING something

so I am relatively certain it hasn't declined enough as of yet

@kviiri yeeeeaaaaahhh

women get a lot more flack just for,..... well being women

it's unfortunate but that is still how #$#%#$ shakes out culturaly in gaming, video and tabletop both

also other things but I am not gonna try to name it all

@BESW I had thought maybe you were speaking in regards to @BESW 's post up there from twitter

which is largely in relation to the gendered part of the issue

@kviiri I've never felt as if "gaming" was toxic. Certainly there are toxic people, but that can be said of any group. Just look at soccer fan clubs! And noone says soccer is "toxic"

@Helwar Yeah but it's established so no one pays attention. :<

again,.... just because you don't have experience of it does not mean it,.... doesn't exist

@trogdor I think Helwar means to refute the labeling of the hobby scene rather than the experiences themselves (did I understand you correctly, @Helwar?)

mmm

what I say is, I'm sure it exists, as toxic people are everywhere. What I'm saying is that I don't think "gaming" as having a toxic community, just some vocal randoms

what @kviiri said

I personally think either layer of abstraction is fine as long as the issue discussed remains the same

The vocal randoms are a serious issue

I mean,... I suppose that depends entirely on exactly how you would define whether a hobby or industry is toxic based on exactly how many people established in that hobby or industry act in toxic ways,.....

@trogdor The post was good though, although its advice won't really do much with me because I don't like cons in the first place :(

But I guess it has its applications elsewhere too.

I don't mean it to say gaming is bad in it's own right, just that it has an established culture base that does to some degree support toxic behaviour

and not just in a gendered basis

and yes, it does depend what game it is, who is playing it, and other factors

I'm a little biased, I've been talking the last few weeks too much in my group of friends about male-female disparities and abuse etc... Those arguments tend to end in generalizations "men do this!" "men don't want women to succeed!" or whatever. I'm pro equality, but by the end of those debates, as a white male, I feel like all those generalizations include me in too and I feel like I have to make the distinction

@kviiri same, but if it helps anyone at all it's still a nice net positive

@trogdor Aye :)

@Helwar I admit that sometimes when a generalization is used, I also feel a little like that, but it's important to distinguish that when a woman says these kinds of things,.... it's because she is sick of it happening to her

most likely

it isn't generally meant as some kind of personal insult

"men as a whole are not bad. Some of us are". And I feel the same talking about other comunities, gaming for example. Yes, there are bad apples, and although i haven't had any bad experience like that, I can't say that those don't happen. But I refuse to say "gaming is toxic!", what's toxic is some of its members... and not especially that mch, compared to other hobbies

@trogdor Yeah I know, but by the end of the conversation sometimes I feel like: "Well, I'm gonna jump off a bridge or something, as it seems that as a male i'm destinied to bully women"

Well ok, I think there's a problem that I have a more inside look on gaming (including video games) than most, but I don't think many hobby scenes have as passionate haters as gaming does. Could be that I just don't know them

I don't know so much about tabletop gaming, but as someone who plays videogames,...... I certainly have seen a much higher prevalence of really loud jerks/trolls deciding they have to dump their frustration on me or even someone else while I was a witness

But I would be surprised to have heard that, for example, J.K. Rowling had gotten a significant amount of spiteful or violent threats for ruining Harry Potter with "The Cursed Child", where that seems to be a norm for game designers who change their games in ways the fans don't like.

one thinks that with "non-mainstream hobbies" like ours, our communities would try and make efforts to be as inclusive as possible

it's not the case... but it would make sense

@kviiri I don't know what the Cursed Child is... Googling

@kviiri Wha was the lie?

I ask that as someone who enjoys cons very much because they connect me with new and interesting people, but I wouldn't want to achieve that through false advertising.

@Helwar It's a theatrical adaptation and sequel to Harry Potter series, which winds up retconning a lot of stuff in the HP verse. I don't like it at all personally, but I would never consider loathing Rowling or her works on a personal level because of that.

@Anaphory I was told it's a sci-fi and comic book event (I was quite much into BD at that time) but it turned out to be anime and manga only.

Ah.

Not that I have anything against anime or manga, but I guess I just never saw the point of lumping it all together, seeing that both are rather diverse categories

Then again I respect the tastes of my nipponophile friends even if I don't see the allure myself :)

anime are just comics by another name, isn't it? :P

@kviiri I would be upset if I went under those pretenses as well

They're broad categories of style that extend beyond "how it's drawn" and "where it's made" but without a very clear defining line

to be fair though,... I am not sure I will ever really want to go to a con regardless

A bit like roguelikes on the video game side. There are games that are clearly roguelikes, eg. NetHack or Angband, and games that clearly aren't, like Call of Duty or Secret of Monkey Island, and then a lot of games that are sorta like roguelikes in a way but eschew one or more traditional conventions associated with the genre, so it's not trivial to determine how much departures a game can make without ceasing to be a roguelike.

Honestly, I think it's all marketing. People say their work is manga if they want it to be evaluated as a manga, or a roguelike if they want it to be viewed using the same framework used by roguelikes.

well, manga is TOO JAPANESE to not be identifiable. Even if it's Korean or Chinese or French manga

they follow the japanese style not only in art, but also in story composition and all the tropes and everything

western comic is so different it might be a completely different medium

@Helwar Exactly, but not every work follows them in the same way, and some eschew one or more of those tropes completely.

And then there's Western comics that draw clear influences from manga without labeling themselves as such

Either in drawing, composition or the tropes used, I mean.

Same for anime vs Western animation, and for that I even have a proper example: Finnish imageboards used to flamewar constantly about whether the early 1990's Moomin television series is anime or not.

Because everyone (within reasonable confidence bounds) likes the Moomin series but of course the anime haters couldn't like an anime, so they had to argue against it being one in the first place.

I KNOW those cartoons... I don't think I ever saw an episode of that, and i'm pretty sure in spain it was called something else... But I know that :P

It's pretty good!

I mean, especially the Finnish dub which has all kinds of funny or old-timey expressions here and there.

TIL Mac keyboards let me type em and en dashes. I knew they let me type opening/closing quotes, but this is just icing on the cake. I wish I could type with one of these at home too.

(I should try to get an autohotkey thing set up to give me bindings for those characters...)

My keyboard apparently does a proper dash with Alt Gr + - (hyphen)

I'm one of those anarchists who prefer to just use - everywhere though.

@doppelgreener em and en dashes?

@Helwar hyphen -, en dash –, em dash —

@Helwar Different lengths of dashes. Traditionally there's three lengths: hyphen, en-dash (as wide as a 'n') and em-dash (as wide as an 'm')

Although "as wide as" is more based on handwriting than computer writing.

en dashes are used to separate number ranges (1–9), em dashes—a favorite of writers—are used to separate text and can be used in similar ways to parentheticals or to colons.

huh, I knew in computers sometimes you get one dash or another

but I thought it was just for the looks

they have different meanings?

the only dash used in spanish is to cut words in 2 lines xD

They have difference in use, yeah.

Hyphen is used to split words between lines and to connect certain compound words (far more common in certain other languages than in English)

And dashes (longer lines) are supposed to be used as doppelgreener notes, although I'm personally not fond of those rules

doppelgreener notes :D

I actually just use - and let the text editor choose whatever. As long as the opening - is the same as the ending - all's good for me

theory is still being formalised on what doppelgreener notes are exactly

but everyone agrees dashes should be used for them

@kviiri omg I love this XD

I never really saw what the "phrase it as a question" thing brought to Jeopardy

@kviiri it's a gimmick!

this obviously

every game show has to have a gimmick

it all came down to this moment

@kviiri no truer question has been asked

to give me. personally, joy now

I have it on loop right now

can't get enough

(i'm sorry David Duchovny so sorry but not sorry but sorry but not sorry)

The fun thing is that you can reverse the order of question and answer segments on Jeopardy to see people pay a lot of money for getting really obscure bad answers on their basic questions.

"What is DnD?" "This tabletop game's first edition had Fighting-man, Magic-user and Cleric as playable classes."

+1 fake internet point to whoever starts answering all questions like Jeopardy

what is, talky man?

what is, androgynous elf?

what is, smelly dorf?

sorry I re-read OOTs recently

hehe :)

I re-read the AW book over the weekend and now I want to play again :| I have so many new cool ideas, even about playbooks that didn't catch me fancy before.

If I got to play right now, I'd love taking a shot at being The Quarantine

@kviiri I wanna play more of its hacks.

@Anaphory I still haven't found a hack that felt as right as the original, although I can't really say I've been diligent in seeking them.

After watching Breaking Bad I considered buying, what was that, Cartel?

@kviiri Yep. Not my setting, so that one would be very low on my list. I think Masks (Teenage Superhero Drama) and Night Witches (WW2 Female Soviet Fighter Pilots) are high on my list.

@Anaphory Night Witches sounds awesome, although I can't immediately see how the core mechanic translates into fighter combat :P

It's far more an independent game based on the principles than a shallow hack.

Ah, okay

Superheroes are interesting too. When I read Worm I was rather excited to base an RPG around those, but they're not really in among my circle of friends

I'm not a huge superhero fan. I played Masks (at a con!) last year, and I found it nice already even though it was not run very PbtA-like, and I think it would be awesome if it was. Two interesting things: The moves are far more concerned with the teenage drama than with the superheroic fights, and your stats move about depending on the people who have influence over you. (All adults tend to have influence over all PCs.)